


solstice bells (ring out)

by rain_sleet_snow



Category: Primeval
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe: Most of the Population Celebrates Yule, Ambiguous Character Death, F/M, Family Dynamics, Female Friendship, Grief/Mourning, Multi, Religion, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-30
Updated: 2019-12-30
Packaged: 2021-02-27 07:42:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,255
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22033495
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rain_sleet_snow/pseuds/rain_sleet_snow
Summary: Several months after Nick Cutter failed to swim out of an anomaly in a watery basement, Claudia Brown celebrates Yule, quits coffee, and turns over a new leaf.
Relationships: Claudia Brown & Abby Maitland, Claudia Brown & Lorraine Wickes, Claudia Brown & Tom Ryan (Primeval), Claudia Brown & her family, Claudia Brown/Nick Cutter, James Lester & Claudia Brown, Nick Cutter & Helen Cutter, Stephen Hart/Abby Maitland/Connor Temple
Comments: 16
Kudos: 17





	solstice bells (ring out)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [missyvortexdv (Purpleyin)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Purpleyin/gifts).



> For missyvortexdv in Primeval Denial's Secret Santa 2019. I think I managed to get a fair few of your requests in: enjoy!
> 
> Thank you to Niamh and Luka for checking it for outrageous disaster: any remaining errors are my own.

“It’s very you,” Abby said politely, inspecting Claudia’s new flat.

“Thank you,” Claudia said, instead of pointing out that she had only just moved in and the cream walls and sparse pine furniture from IKEA were to be attributed less to her own personal taste and more to the fact that she hadn’t had time to paint and needed something to sleep on, eat off, and sit on. Maybe, if she was charitable, Abby was actually referring to the light-filled windows and central location. Claudia had been lucky to find such a bargain. The mortgage still made her feel a bit dizzy when she thought about it, but the last six months had given her very little taste for dwelling on things she couldn’t change.

“You said you were thinking of painting?”

“I absolutely intend to make you help me paint things,” Claudia said cheerfully. “This is a girl’s night in, Brown-style.”

Abby’s pixie-ish little face crinkled into a grin. “I showed up dressed for it.”

Claudia had been reserving comment on Abby’s oversized t-shirt and torn jeans at least as much as Abby had been reserving comment on the anodyne decor, so she grinned back. “I had an old t-shirt to offer you, but it’s good you came prepared. Do you want wine or beer with your paint roller?”

“Beer,” Abby said promptly. Claudia cracked open a bottle of each while Abby went to investigate the room set up to be painted - the living room, because it had least in it, and would therefore be easiest. Claudia had already shoved what furniture there was into the centre of the room, and laid down masking tape on the skirting boards and cornices to avoid splatters on the ceiling or boards. The carpet was covered with newspaper, the wallpaper had been stripped with enthusiastic, if somewhat wayward, help from her brother Julian, and the duck-egg blue paint was ready to go. There was also a muted turquoise for a statement wall, but Claudia thought it would be better to build up to that.

Claudia carried glasses of beer and wine into the living room, and found Abby holding a photograph frame, one of several that had been left on top of the downed bookcase and coffee table. (The sofa had been hideous beyond belief, and had belonged to a previous flatmate anyway. Claudia had also made Julian help her take it to the tip, prior to the wallpaper strippng.)

Abby turned slightly, and Claudia recognised the walnut-coloured frame, the faint hint of a familiar figure in the photograph.

“Oh,” she said, setting the glasses down on the floor and taking the frame from Abby’s unresisting fingers. The glasses, unlike the frame, were plastic; she wasn’t the kind of person who drank a leisurely glass of wine in the bathtub with candles and a good book, but she had ambitions to be. “I’d forgotten about that.”

“I’m surprised you keep a picture of him.” Abby picked up her beer and took a healthy gulp.

“So am I, to be honest, but I haven’t thrown it away yet.” Claudia set the photograph frame on the upended coffee-table face down, and picked up one of Connor, Abby and Stephen, instead. It had been taken after a long call-out involving too much cold water; Abby and Stephen were both heavily wrapped in towels, their hair wet and plastered to their skulls, and both of them had their eyes on Connor, who was bone dry and in the act of passing Stephen a hot drink. Abby already had her hands wrapped around a mug, and her feet in Connor’s lap. “I like this one.”

Abby gave it a cursory look, and an even briefer smile. “Me too. Claudia…”

“Hmm?”

“Do you ever think about him?”

Nick, of course; Nick smiling absently with light in those bright blue eyes, gleaming off his tousled blond hair, as he stared off just to the side of the camera.

“Sometimes,” Claudia said. “It would be strange if I didn’t.”

“Do you ever think he regrets it?”

“Running off with Helen?” Claudia shook her head. “I know what Sir James says, but we’ll never know for sure if that’s what he did. And Stephen’s absolutely right. Wrapped in a wetsuit with none of his fieldwork gear - not even a notebook - is not how Nick would have chosen to go. He would have come back for tools.”

“He did, though.”

“We’ll never know,” Claudia repeated.

Abby looked at her with sad icy-blue eyes.

“As my therapist keeps telling me,” Claudia explained, picking up her glass of wine, “I can’t control other people’s actions, and trying to read their minds is an exercise in pointlessness.”

Abby digested this.

“I find it interesting that you don’t assume he drowned.”

“That’s what Stephen thinks,” Abby said absently. “But I just don’t…”

There was a long pause. Claudia tipped paint into a tray, picked up a roller and ran it briskly through the paint, then slapped it onto the wall.

“You go to therapy?” Abby said at last, picking up her own roller.

“I do, and you’re supposed to too.”

Abby muttered something Claudia didn’t catch, and started on a different wall.

Claudia set down her roller for a second, and pulled her laptop from the hall, booting it up. Abby seemed absorbed in her painting, covering large stretches so fast Claudia momentarily congratulated herself on inviting the other woman around; maybe she should get Stephen to do her room, supposing he was equally efficient. She waited for iTunes to load, watching Abby’s back; she seemed tense. Maybe the energy was less exceptional painting and decorating skills and more a release of emotional tension.

Either way, it was getting her living room painted very fast.

Claudia cranked up the volume and dramatic chords filled the room. Abby stopped painting to groan. “Them?”

“I like them.”

“It’s 2007! For fuck’s sake.”

_I’m doing this to-night, you’re prob’ly gonna start a fight -_

“Oh my god,” Abby said, rolling her eyes like she wasn’t grinning herself.

_I know this can’t be right_ , “Hey baby come o-o-n,” Claudia sang to herself, picking up her roller, and let Abby’s laughter tell her that this was going to be okay.

They painted until the tin was finished, the laptop started to crash, and the neighbours started to bang on the ceiling - either they preferred NSYNC to Blue, or they wanted to get some shut-eye at nine p.m. on a Saturday night. Claudia considered that her name was likely already mud with her neighbours, as a consequence of the number of times the ARC had turned up in the middle of the night and whisked her off to parts unknown and dinosaur-infested - it had been a busy two months - so didn’t fret about it, overall, even if Abby looked mildly guilty.

“We can do the turquoise tomorrow morning, if you like,” Abby offered, sizing up the drying paint with a careful eye. “It won’t take so long and the other blue will be dry by then.”

“Only if you don’t mind staying,” Claudia said, pleasantly surprised. “Breakfast is on me.”

Abby flashed her a smile.

“How did you get so good at this anyway?” Claudia had been pleasantly surprised by that, too: Abby had covered two entire walls, gone to make a cup of tea, and come back with tea and chocolate HobNobs by the time Claudia had laboriously finished one single wall.

Shutters went down behind Abby’s eyes. “Used to do stuff like this for summer work. It’s not hard.” She shrugged, and put on a practised smile. “Easier than mucking out elephants. Cleaner, too.”

“If it weren’t cleaner than mucking out elephants I’d be worried,” Claudia retorted, curious rather than cursing herself for the misstep. She pattered out to give Abby some time to recover from whatever that was, and returned with takeaway menus pulled from the cork board in the kitchen. “Pizza, Chinese, or Indian?” She fanned them out in her hands. “You pick.”

The photograph of Nick on the coffee table was the right way up, she noticed. Abby must have flipped it.

The next morning, Abby helped her with the turquoise, and then - in return for the fry-up Claudia made, since a mere pile of pancakes couldn't be considered sufficient recompense - constructed an IKEA TV cabinet that had been giving Claudia some trouble. When Claudia came to get her for their second breakfast, she found the other woman picking over a tangle of Yule decorations, which had been stuffed willy-nilly into a Tesco's bag in a cupboard and forgotten about. Claudia remembered, with a pang, that it was in fact the first of December.

"I suppose I should decorate soon," Claudia said. "Maybe painting counts as my intent for a new and brighter year. Are you religious?" She'd never seen any particular signs of it - neither Stephen's discreet, disorganised faith in the natural world, or Lester's bored assumption of establishment ritual - but you never knew.

Abby tilted her head from side to side, neither yes nor no. "Are you taking time off for the holiday?"

"Yes," Claudia said. "The full holiday, actually, though I'll obviously be on call."

"Nice," Abby said appreciatively. "Going anywhere special?"

"No, just spending time with family." Claudia didn't avoid Abby's curious eye, but she didn't react to it either. Most people Claudia's age would only go home for a few days around the solstice itself, rather than stay home for all of Yule; different sects laid importance on different days, of course, and there were other religions that didn't even celebrate Yule at all, but generally people preferred to party with friends.

Claudia's discussions with her ARC-approved therapist had majored, lately, on the importance of maintaining strong social relations as part of resilience to trauma, and the ways the ARC had caused some of her most important personal relationships to atrophy, and herself to develop a habit of systematically keeping information away from her family and friends. Claudia's parents had hardly even known about Nick until he ran off with Helen, and they'd had some trouble understanding why she was so upset.

If he had run off with Helen. Stephen thought he'd drowned, an insufficiently experienced diver to make his way through the anomaly solo; Ryan, who took a more pessimistic view of the wildlife, said he'd most likely been eaten by the mosasaur. Abby and Sir James -united only in their mistrust of humanity at large - thought he'd gone with Helen. Connor didn't say what he thought. He just looked at Claudia like he felt someone needed to atone for this specific wrong the world had done her, and prioritised her IT support requests. IT support wasn't even his job, really.

"Nice," Abby said eventually, picking over a string of lights in the shape of little candles, and a reversible garland that bore figures of the Crone and the Maiden. There had once been a collapsible altar, but Claudia had got rid of it on public health grounds one year after she'd gone to Malaga for the holidays and forgotten all about the offerings.

"Any plans yourself?" Claudia asked, suspecting the answer would be a polite deflection.

Abby raised her head and smiled sweetly, lopsidedly. "Working over the holiday with Connor and Stephen. It's fine," she added, before Claudia could say anything, "I wasn't thinking of doing anything else. It'll be good."

Claudia smiled back at her, because it felt right. Whatever the project's failings, and in Claudia's experience these were many, it had brought together people who needed each other.

That brought Nick's face to mind. As her therapist had discussed with her, Claudia acknowledged the thought and let it go.

Claudia spent what remained of the weekend unpacking books, making bolognese, and - after a leisurely dinner and a bubble bath - decorating for Yule. The therapist had also said it was important to acknowledge the passage of time, not to pretend that nothing had happened and avoid celebrating holidays or birthdays in order to avoid being reminded of the person you’d lost. Also, now that Abby had put it into her mind, the flat did look strange and bare without any of the decorations Claudia was used to seeing at this time of year, and she remembered vividly how off she’d felt last year when she’d been too busy lying about pterosaurs in Anglesey to decorate until the very last minute.

Nick had been a confirmed atheist, and he’d kept on laughing at her decorations and asking irritating questions in a way that made Stephen’s habit of disappearing privately to the nearest quiet hilltop on major religious holidays and communing with nature at dawn completely understandable. At least now in Connor and Abby he’d found people who would hike to the hilltop with him, though no doubt Connor would complain about the hour. And Abby, unlike either man, would be sure to have her phone with her and turned on, so there would be no more repetitions of the Great Hampstead Heath Hunt of Beltane 2007, when a (fortunately, false) alarm had found Stephen uncontactable due to spiritual experience. Lester had been extremely sarcastic.

Claudia put on some Michael Bublé and pulled out boxes of decorations, cast aside as the thing she was least likely to need on her arrival in the new flat and now marooned by the opening and discarding of boxes full of plates, sheets and toiletries. She emptied out the Tesco’s bag and sat on the floor with a glass of wine to hand, disentangling strings of fairy lights and knocking the wax out of candleholders she probably had some tea lights for somewhere. She strung the hall with lights, and put the candleholders on her kitchen table and coffee-table; she could buy a poinsettia or some sticks of holly to accompany them later. The Crone and the Maiden garland she draped above a half-full bookcase, still awaiting the arrival of books she’d stashed at her parents’ years ago, and placed beneath it the clay figurines and yellow sun disk she’d made and painted at a course that had accompanied her A-Levels, which was supposed to lower stress and foster her artistic interests. Claudia privately felt that it would be extremely clear to anyone seeing the figurines that she had no artistic interests, but the colours weren’t horrible and it was nice, to have something handmade. She hadn’t thought this out in advance, so there were no holly sticks or mistletoe boughs and she certainly hadn’t made ginger biscuits or spiced cider or anything of that kind, but it all looked very festive. Especially if she turned the fairy lights off and pretended she had candles lit before the sun disk and in the candle-holders. (She had been wrong about the tea lights.)

Claudia, standing in the hall, switched the lights back on and let her eyes stray to her front door - securely locked with a system vetted by the ubiquitous Captain Ryan, for whom Helen’s continued absence from a jail cell was a lasting irritation. Julian had brought her a horseshoe to put up over it: most people didn’t bother these days, or had some kind of decorative bar instead of functional iron, but Julian had a superstitious streak. And frankly, after working on the anomaly project for more than a year, so did Claudia.

Julian hadn’t asked her permission and he’d nailed up the horseshoe, which meant that when the time came to paint the hall - she could live with eggshell white in this particular space, but she didn’t like it - she would need to paint round the bloody thing. Claudia wasn’t angry.

She made herself a cup of tea and brushed her teeth, wondering if the boughs of holly and bars of iron people had put up against ghasts and ghouls in days past had actually been meant to keep out creatures that came from the anomalies, or even people that came from the anomalies. The ARC needed a historian, really, to understand how these things had worked, but Claudia wouldn’t be surprised. She’d seen the instincts of ordinary people in the face of anomalies; when they weren’t being stupid beyond belief, they retreated to strong walls, barred doors, picked up iron, and lit fires.

She thought her direct line to the police and cricket bat close at hand would likely be more effective than a horseshoe over her door. Especially if Helen showed up; the woman might be ghoulish, but she could obviously pass a threshold without harm… still, if Nick was alive and with her, Helen wouldn’t hurt her, and anyway there was little evidence that Helen herself had ever actually attacked anyone, even if her moral compass did point due south-west…

Claudia fell asleep on this peculiar thought, and woke up in the middle of the night to realise both that she’d forgotten to draw the curtains and that her phone was squawking. She fumbled for it on the bedside table, sending her alarm clock flying, and accepted the call blindly.

“Hmmmrgh,” she said into the phone.

“Good morning, Miss Brown,” Captain Ryan said, impeccably professional as always.

Claudia flopped onto her back. “What bloody fucking time do you call this, Captain?”

It was possible her vocabulary had deteriorated, working with soldiers.

“Half past four in the morning, Miss Brown,” Captain Ryan said, with well hidden undertones of sadistic glee. “Didn’t you hear us pull up?”

“No, because I was asleep,” Claudia moaned. “Oh, Two-fold Goddess. Why.”

“There’s an anomaly out near Bedford,” Captain Ryan said. “And the security guard who called it in mentioned a dark-haired white woman of medium height and build messing around.”

Claudia caught her breath, swore, and threw back the duvet. It was cold; she shivered and swore again. “Helen fucking Cutter.”

“Maybe.”

“Give me five minutes.” There was a knock on the door, and Claudia automatically tensed. “Did you send someone up?”

“You sleep deeply,” Captain Ryan said blandly.

“Oh, piss off,” Claudia said, and threw her phone into the middle of her bed before wrapping her dressing gown round herself. The knock was repeated.

"Coming," Claudia yelled, shivering half with irritation and half with cold. Damn the neighbours. She slapped the hall light switch and wrenched her front door open.

Stephen stood there, looking faintly taken aback. Ryan had sent up one of the soldiers with him, Lacey, dressed in full black kit and a perceptible air of focused enthusiasm. She probably had her eye on getting Helen Cutter.

"Come in," Claudia grumbled. "Who knows what my neighbours will think if they see you."

"It was me or Blade," Lacey said cheerfully, shuffling inside with Stephen, who kept his hands in his pockets like this was a museum and he'd been told not to touch. Claudia winced.

"Small mercies," she said dryly, hurrying back to her room to dress largely at random and throw an assortment of necessities at her handbag, still open by her bed from Friday.

"Oh, you decorated for Yule," Lacey said, no doubt poking through Claudia's things with her characteristic inquisitiveness.

"It seemed like a good idea at the time!" Claudia said, catching Stephen's little grin as she dashed back into the bathroom and stuck a toothbrush into her mouth. "Fun plans for the holidays?"

"Avoiding Midnight Mass!"

Claudia spat out froth and wracked her brains. A GCSE in religious studies had been a long time ago. "Oh, you're Christian?"

"Well, my family is," Lacey said, without noticeable devotion. "But when it comes to walking miles in the snow in the middle of the night just to listen to a priest go on about a child being born, I come over all irreligious."

"I thought you were tough?" Stephen enquired.

Claudia waved mascara at her eyelashes and gloss at her mouth and darted out of the bathroom in time to see Lacey flip Stephen off. "Not when I don't have to be!"

The drive to Bedford was long, but not as long as it could have been, considering they were on the road before five and had put up the blue lights - though not, in deference to the hour, the sirens. Claudia had forgotten to bring anything to eat, but Captain Ryan hadn't. He passed her a coffee and a couple of enormous samosas from the Indian takeaway around the corner from the anomaly project that never closed and probably knew more about them than the pub around the other corner. Claudia ate in silence, and watched miles of motorway roll beneath their wheels. In the back, Stephen was tense and quiet; he always was at the prospect of encountering Helen. He blamed her, Claudia suspected, for Nick's death, and then there was some ill-defined memory of a rumour in his file from when he'd been a PhD student - Helen when she'd preyed on small, limited pools of people, rather than anyone within reach of an anomaly.

Well, Stephen would talk about it in his own time, or then again not.

They reached the industrial estate an hour before dawn, while the world stirred reluctantly around them. There was a population of fairly harmless aquilops skittering around the estate, but no signs at all of Helen. When Claudia rewound and watched the relevant minutes of CCTV footage, she couldn't have said for sure if the figure casually strolling between warehouses was Helen Cutter or another trespasser. But she thought she would have known the other woman.

"She doesn't walk like her," Claudia said to Ryan, who squinted at the screen and seemed to agree.

Claudia sighed. "I'll put it down as a probably not."

She took a copy of the relevant clip of footage, just in case, and stepped out of the security Portakabin into the dawn rising pale blue and celestial over the estate. The air was clear and bright, the sunshine thin but golden, and Claudia took a deep cold breath and thought she understood why, millennia ago, people had chosen to celebrate the return of the sun.

Her team could dimly be heard yelping and scuffling with dinosaurs, but going by Connor's laughter it was the amusing kind of scuffle, not the kind that would end with them on first name terms with yet another Minor Injuries Unit.

"Just another day at the office," Captain Ryan said.

Claudia laughed.

And then, of course, even though she'd been up and working since four-thirty, Claudia had to go to work. Anomalies waited for no sleep schedule. Claudia actually thought the Yule present she wanted most in the world was a week or so of decent shut-eye.

Sir James looked perfectly soigné, but then he always did. Claudia breezed past him as though she hadn't realised half an hour ago that her shirt was inside out, dumped her bag on the desk, and gratefully received the coffee that Lorraine Wickes brought her.

"Are you sure it wasn't Helen Cutter?" Sir James asked without looking up.

"Good morning to you too," Claudia said, rolling her eyes at Lorraine, who smirked very slightly. "As sure as I can be, with only a dodgy description and bad CCTV footage."

Sir James muttered something about fugitives in time and space. Claudia drank her coffee and got on with her job.

At lunchtime, she went out with Lorraine to buy a sandwich (Yule special: pork, ginger chutney and slightly anaemic salad on wholegrain brown bread, for people pretending the festive season had already arrived and they weren't stuck at work). There was a Poundland on the way, selling cards and decorations and tea lights; Claudia remembered her empty candle holders, and took a quick left.

"Decorating?" Lorraine said, stepping out of the way of the queue and narrowly avoiding knocking a mirror-plated menorah (on special offer, since Chanukah had been and gone) into next Tuesday.

Claudia nodded. "You?" Lorraine, as Claudia knew perfectly well, was an even more convinced atheist than Nick had been, but she had a young niece, and kids often got sucked into these things when presents and sweets and fireworks were on offer.

“Up to a point,” Lorraine said. “I draw the line at a Yule log in a top-floor flat.”

“Well, you would, wouldn’t you.”

Lorraine smiled. “My neighbours didn’t last year. We had to get the fire brigade in.”

“Ugh.” Claudia bought a mixed box of red and green tea lights, green for the log and red for… fire, Claudia presumed, and a smaller box of long gold candles for the classier candleholders she owned.

“Celebrating in a big way this year?”

“I think we could all do with a bit of rebirth,” Claudia said, more sincerely than she meant to.

Lorraine raised her eyebrows, but she didn’t disagree.

The next day there was another anomaly: deinonychus, half-past one sharp, in some school outbuildings. Claudia’s heart began to race as soon as she discovered the anomaly’s location and didn’t get back to normal for hours: her sense of urgency was such that she hardly noticed when it did. She just realised suddenly in the middle of explaining to the third journalist that it was a straightforward case of a police tip-off about the abandoned sheds, nothing suspicious about it, that her breathing was back where it should be. And promptly hiccuped like she was choking on air, and blamed it on her cooling coffee going down the wrong way.

They were old deinonychus, and injured, which would have made them desperate and brutal, but it also made them easier to catch.Would you call that a blessing? Yes, with kids on the line. School hadn’t even broken up for Yule yet.

Fortunately the only injuries were minor. Claudia gave Kermit, who had been slightly clawed by a flailing dinosaur in the process of expiring, and Finn, who had fallen over his own feet, a lift to A&E, and went next door for festively overpriced coffee from the hospital Costa. Finn immediately spiked his and Kermit's.

Claudia sighed. "You didn't see that," she said, to the hassled and knackered-looking junior doctor stitching up the shallow slice on Kermit's leg, and handed him the fourth coffee to seal the deal.

"Want some?" Finn asked, irrepressibly.

"I'm driving," Claudia said, too used to them to be appalled.

"I'm working," the doctor complained. "Just don't drink heavily while you're on the antibiotics, and by that I mean you can have a couple of beers but if you drink more you'll get very sick and be right back here."

"Cheers," Kermit said. The doctor gave him the hairy eyeball.

"Thanks anyway for the coffee, miss."

"You're welcome," Claudia said, sipping her own. Gingerbread syrup and too much sugar: perfect. Also decaf, because it was her fourth of the day. Maybe her good intentions for the new year should include going easy on the caffeine instead of painting her flat. "Incidentally, can I ask why the light-up holly wreath?"

The doctor sighed and adjusted his plastic crown, which was still glowing merrily. "I was in paediatric A&E before you lot came in. Sister on duty is wearing glittery oak leaves. I'm just grateful they went for Oak King and Holly King, nobody makes a convincing Maiden at this point in a shift."

Kermit stifled a snigger. The doctor pointed minatorily at him. "Don't forget who's still stitching you up."

"Sorry, your majesty," Kermit said, not sounding terribly repentant.

"Happy Yule," Claudia interrupted.

"And to you, miss." The doctor tied off the last stitch, prescribed more painkillers, and delivered a variety of dreadful warnings, some of which might be heeded. "I hope you never have to see me again." He paused, and Claudia sighed internally as she detected the tell-tale signs of a sceptical medic. "By the way, must have been a fucking enormous rooster to do that to your colleague's leg."

"Prize-winning cock," Finn said very blandly.

"Out!" said the doctor. They didn't hear him laughing until the door swung shut behind them.

By the time Lorraine dropped by for dinner - a monthly ritual that had begun with Lorraine showing up with Tupperware of chilli con carne and no judgement two weeks after Nick had failed to return through an anomaly in a watery basement, and explaining that she hadn’t seen Claudia eat a full meal for too long - Claudia’s flat was fully decorated. It made no sense, really, since she wouldn’t be spending a day of the holiday itself here, but Claudia had discovered some kind of festive spirit in herself and was manifesting it through scented candles and evergreens. It felt uncomplicatedly, straightforwardly good, and given her working life Claudia wasn’t about to argue with that.

Lorraine looked faintly surprised, but she couldn’t have been as surprised as all that, because instead of a bottle of white wine she handed Claudia spiced cider. It had a little gold Yule wreath printed around the neck and everything.

“Perfect!” Claudia said, hugging her. “We’re having bangers and mash, cider will be great with it.”

Lorraine smiled. “Going traditional?”

“Apparently. I caught myself making ginger biscuits the other day.”

Lorraine glanced around. “It’s very homey. It looks like you’ve really been able to settle in since the last time I visited.”

“Last time you visited I’d barely unpacked the kettle. Take a look at the living room - Abby helped me paint it. Apparently she used to work for a decorator in the holidays.”

“Not quite,” Lorraine said absently. “Her stepfather was a painter and handyman.” She wandered into the living room.

“Abby never mentioned a stepfather.”

“If I had a stepfather like that, I wouldn’t mention him either,” Lorraine said cryptically. “This is so pretty, Claudia, especially with the candle-light.”

“Isn’t it? I did my bedroom the other day, but I’m not as tidy with a roller as Abby is.” Claudia poured two glasses of cider, and brought one through to Lorraine. “What about her stepfather?”

“Nothing about him,” Lorraine said. “He’s not going to be a problem.”

“Tell me you didn’t assassinate him,” Claudia said.

“I didn’t assassinate him,” Lorraine repeated obediently, a tiny smile twitching at the corner of her mouth. “Can I see the bedroom?”

Claudia showed her. She’d gone with a soft yellow in this room; not pale enough to be called primrose, but not far off. It was very pretty and restful, which was nice even if Claudia spent most of her time in it passed out with exhaustion.

“Lovely,” Lorraine said politely. “You’re very organised. I still haven’t unpacked all my books. I haven’t even thought about decorating.”

“Well, this is the first time I haven’t had the rental contract from hell,” Claudia said. “And my therapist says healthy, practical occupation is good for me. It’s more satisfying than rewatching Poirot episodes on a loop.”

Lorraine gave her a very thoughtful look, but (instead of asking questions Claudia wouldn’t know how to answer) said: “What’s the scent?”

“What?”

“The candles,” Lorraine clarified.

“Oh,” Claudia said. “Orange and clove. It was that or sage.” She shrugged. “American brand.”

Dinner went much as it always did. Quiet conversation, a little talk about work - neither of them could ever really speak freely in the anomaly project’s offices, especially if something interesting was happening; the project was a hive of gossip and both of them were supposed to be in possession of privileged information, so people tended to listen closely - and somewhat less about life outside work. It was nice, to talk to someone who really knew what she dealt with, day to day. Under other circumstances, in other lives, they probably wouldn’t have become friends. If Nick hadn’t died, they would probably never have been more than workplace acquaintances. But he had, and of all the peculiar turns Claudia’s life had taken, unexpected support from a colleague was probably the most pleasant.

Claudia told her about the village in Kent near Sevenoaks where Claudia had grown up, and the Yule log bonfire in the middle of the village green that was still going, despite the fruitless pleadings of the Christian vicar that it be held somewhere other than right in front of the chapel; in return, Lorraine talked about the half of her Yule holiday she planned to spend in Yorkshire with her boyfriend’s family, where she had a vague suspicion that she might actually witness an animal sacrifice as part of the celebrations.

“They used to do that when I was a kid, but it was expensive and messy and the butcher who did it retired,” Claudia said, grinning at the apprehensive look on Lorraine’s face. “Plus nobody felt like hanging around for the meat to be properly dressed and cooked in the middle of winter. Now we just grill things. Oh, and bake potatoes, of course.”

“It’s the middle of winter bit I was worried about,” Lorraine said darkly. “I am not standing around for hours in freezing horrible weather, Yule or not. I wouldn’t even celebrate Yule if it wasn’t for my family.”

“I think Blade was teasing you,” Claudia said.

“The problem is you can’t tell with him,” Lorraine said, and poured out the last glass of cider.

“Not even you?”

“No,” Lorraine said, looking put-upon. “Not when he’s making an effort.”

Claudia laughed. “Goddess forbid you not know everything.”

Lorraine cracked a reluctant smile.

They ate ice-cream for dessert, and then Claudia managed to persuade Lorraine to stay for a coffee (good intentions didn't have to start until the new year, right?) until it got late enough that Lorraine said she really had to go and wrapped herself up in layers of coats.

“You seem much better,” Lorraine observed, knotting her scarf. “Lighter.”

“Well, I’m working on it,” Claudia replied, slightly surprised. “It must be that Yuletide feeling.”

Lorraine’s face twitched in a way that suggested any woman less composed would have pulled a face. “Maybe it’s the new flat.” She gave Claudia an appraising look. “I think you needed a change of scene.”

Claudia had a sudden, brilliant flash of memory: the slightly grubby cream walls of her old flat, bubbly and textured from the old wallpaper the landlord had painted straight over, on the day that she had woken up after Nick had gone. She remembered lying and staring at that wallpaper for a long time, as dawn brightened over sheets she had last slept in with Nick, and then getting up and making coffee. Finding Captain Ryan uncomfortably curled up on her ancient sofa had been a shock not merely from the point of view that there was a heavily-armed man asleep in her home, but from the point of view that she must have been behaving so erratically the previous day that he had thought it wiser not to leave her alone.

They had said nothing; he had sat and watched her in perfect silence as she made coffee and stripped the bed and threw away all the clothes she’d been wearing the previous day, right down to the bra, which had been new.It had been a horrible morning, and the memory felt like missing a step on the stairs. But it started not with the coffee or the long-gone sofa (which had deserved to be binned for other reasons entirely) but the wallpaper.

Claudia didn’t know how to hang wallpaper, but if she had known, she still wouldn’t have done it. Her therapist said wallpaper was lousy and a nuisance anyway, but encouraged her not to eliminate it entirely as a future interior decorating choice.

Lorraine was still watching her. She’d been silent for too long.

“Maybe I did,” Claudia said, very evenly, and much to her surprise, Lorraine hugged her.

After the other woman had gone, Claudia went to the window and watched her down the street, brisk tread and beige trenchcoat and dark tweedy newsboy cap drawn over her braids, moving fast under orange streetlights. Lorraine always walked like she had somewhere to be.

There was another figure standing under a streetlight - at the other end of the road from Lorraine, almost out of Claudia’s field of vision if she didn't open the window and stick her head out. Claudia frowned and squinted at him, but he didn’t seem to be doing anything, except perhaps standing around for a smoke.

Fair hair glinted under orange light. Somehow discomfited, Claudia withdrew from the window, and pulled the curtain across. She checked the locks on the front door, and - for no reason she could have identified - reached all the way up, to touch the iron of the horseshoe.

“How festive,” Sir James said, on the nineteenth of December.

“You needn’t sound like you want to vomit,” Claudia replied, sinking back into her chair at the third desk in Sir James’ office: the second, Lorraine’s, was empty, presumably because Lorraine was organising the embryonic Yule party downstairs. Claudia’s hair was still wet and her temper still short from a shower necessitated by an especially grubby anomaly, and she personally considered the holiday music, smell of pulled pork, and palpable air of excitement for the party the day’s only redeeming feature. She was in no mood to allow Sir James to shit all over any of the above, even if he was only grumpy because he’d been stuck with a minor - and particularly officious - Treasury official for the last two and a half hours.

“I remember when you were polite, Miss Brown,” her boss complained, without much heat.

“That was a long time ago and I’d ruined fewer pairs of trousers.” Or nice shirts, Claudia thought mournfully, and hoped for a really good session in the sales when she came back from her parents’.

“Put it on expenses,” Sir James said abruptly, a sentence that made Claudia look up at him and blink. Sir James had rapidly gained a reputation among his staff as a cheeseparing bastard, but Claudia knew exactly how tight the budgetary constraints they were operating within were, and had been in those meetings listening to Sir James fight dirty for their funding. She would expense wrecked clothes if she felt it was reasonable, of course, but she wouldn’t be surprised or angry if she didn’t get the full amount back. Purely from the perspective of someone who would quite like to survive until next Yule, it was probably better to spend the budget on keeping Stephen well-supplied with tranquiliser darts than to worry about replacing wrecked trousers. She was working out how to list replacement clothes as a business expense on her taxes instead.

Sir James, attention no doubt attracted by Claudia’s stare, raised his own head. He looked dishevelled; his pin-striped jacket lay over the back of a chair where it had clearly been hurled when he returned from the meeting, he’d abandoned his tie - presumably because garrotting the Treasury minion with it had been too great a temptation - and he’d clearly been clutching his hair in his fists with irritation. “What?”

“Nothing,” Claudia said, firing up her computer. “I was just surprised.”

“It’s the season for generosity,” Sir James said sententiously. “And I feel like pissing off the Treasury.”

Claudia snorted. Sir James pretended not to smile. “We know you’re human, you know.”

“Rubbish,” Sir James said loftily. “Government hatchet men have no hearts.”

“Whatever,” Claudia said, and devoted herself to filing an expenses report for one (1) pair of Hobbs trousers, rendered unwearable by dinosaur poo, and one (1) Zara shirt, rendered equally unwearable by same.

The party was a triumph. Lorraine might lack any kind of interest in Yule, but she never did anything by halves, and she had been enthusiastically aided and abetted by their colleagues. The anomaly project’s new building, inconveniently placed on the outskirts of London but spacious enough to hold them and the new staff Sir James hoped to hire in the new year, could feel very empty, especially late in the day. Now, smothered in tinsel ‘evergreen’ garlands, ringing with music playing from the anomaly detector Connor had set up in the atrium, and full of laughter and chatter and the smell of the mulled wine, pulled pork with apple and ginger and chocolate cake in the shape of an enormous Yule log ordered from a caterer with clearance, it felt friendly and welcoming. Claudia took a cup of ‘mulled wine’ - allegedly non-alcoholic and mostly made of juice, but Claudia saw at least one hipflask going around - and helped herself to a paper plate piled high with food. From her perch slightly off to one side she sat back and watched Ryan tinkering with the music levels, and Sir James handing out presents from the office gift exchange, and Connor stealing kisses from Abby and Stephen under the mistletoe hoop hung in the doorway - and definitely not removing the berries, as you were supposed to. She received a beautifully soft blue scarf, handknitted by someone who preferred to remain anonymous but who had gone to the trouble of making gold tassels for the ends, and laughingly admitted to having bought Connor a new hat to replace the one that had been lightly chewed by a baby entelodont, and which he had until now refused to get rid of. 

Sir James was just demanding to know who had seen fit to buy him a mug saying WORLD’S OKAYEST BOSS in all-caps red Comic Sans, and Abby had gone into full-on hysterics in response, when the dulcet tones of Mariah Carey singing about all she wanted for Yule cut out and were replaced by Jingle Bell Rock. This was very confusing until Connor plunged into the crowd around the anomaly detector - where Sir James was sitting on an improvised Green Man’s Throne to hand out presents - and hurled himself at his invention.

“Oh, no,” he said, sounding grievously disappointed by life. “Seriously? A live one? Now?”

There was a general groan. Claudia remembered that Jingle Bell Rock was the tune Connor had changed the anomaly detector’s alarm to on the first of December, and her heart sank. She finished her cake, looped her new scarf around her neck, and wrapped up some more pulled pork sandwiches very quickly.

“Where is it?” Sir James demanded, cutting through the disgruntled clamour.

“Uh, near Swindon,” Connor said, tapping furiously at the detector to bring the picture into focus. “It’s… um. Oh.

“It’s what, Mr Temple?”

“CMU,” Stephen said flatly. “That’s CMU.”

This meant nothing to many of the people in the room, who had been hired after the anomaly project’s first scrambling days - when Abby had still technically worked at Wellington Zoo, Connor had theoretically been a student, and Claudia had spent so much time hurrying through Central Metropolitan University’s Department of Evolutionary Zoology that she’d more than once been mistaken for an administrator. There had been weeks when she’d spent more time in the Earth Sciences cafe than she did in Marsham Street, where she technically worked. But none of them had been back since Connor had graduated and Stephen had closed up Cutter’s office.

You could identify the people in the atrium who had been around a while: they looked like they never wanted to go back there.

“What the fuck,” Abby murmured.

“It’s just chance,” Stephen said, with perhaps a little more force than he might otherwise have done. “We still have no reason to believe they’re not random.”

Captain Ryan joined Claudia by the refreshments tables as she piled pulled pork sandwiches and an entire cake into one of the insulating bags the caterer had brought them in. Nobody would notice a couple missing for twelve hours. “Don’t go for that mulled wine,” he said, pointing out one of the huge thermoses. “It’s actually alcoholic. Thanks for the thought, Miss Brown, I’ll send Finn to help you with those.”

Reluctantly, the response team filtered out of the party, which picked up behind them. Claudia had certainly been to anomaly calls on unhappier or more frantic occasions, but she’d never seen everyone quite so surly. The drive to CMU was a long and a silent one, except for the radio Captain Ryan turned on, apparently hoping to relieve the atmosphere. It immediately started to play Driving Home for Yule.

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” Stephen said irritably from the back seat; the soldier sat next to him stared impassively out of the window and pretended none of this was happening, which suggested to Claudia that he was new around here.

Claudia changed the station.

The anomaly was found in a distant car park nowhere near Earth Sciences or Evolutionary Zoology, which was a great, if unexpressed, relief to everyone present. Ryan set up a perimeter and Claudia presented the bags and thermos to Ditzy the medic to hand around, and the food raised morale slightly: most people hadn’t had time to finish a warm meal, and it was now dark, cold and late, slushy snow on the ground that had turned to a thin layer of ice on the undisturbed parts of the grass verges.

Stephen, accompanied by Blade - armed to the teeth and looking all the more dangerous for the mistletoe sticker someone with a death wish had attached to his backpack - stepped through the anomaly briefly, and Claudia tucked her face into her soft new scarf and held her breath.

They were back through again very quickly, Stephen shaking his head.

“Nothing,” he said out loud. Abby passed him a cup of fake mulled wine, and ate a slice of cake in silence. “It looked like tundra. Nothing living at all for miles around, and the ground was too hard for obvious tracks.” He gulped at the drink, and closed his hands tightly around it. “But a few flowers, so post-Cretaceous.”

“No news is good news,” Captain Ryan observed.

Stephen nodded. He looked as if he’d retreated into his old, nearly silent, habits, his mouth thin and pale.

Claudia finished her second sandwich, wiped her mouth delicately, and then volunteered a thought that had been plaguing her since Slough. “I want to check Nick’s office.”

Everyone looked at her.

“It’ll be shut,” Captain Ryan said.

Claudia raised her eyebrows at him. The anomaly team had done a lot of dubiously legal breaking and entering, mostly excused by the fact that they were in search of dinosaurs at the time. “Are you saying that’s a problem?”

Captain Ryan’s silence betrayed the fact that no, it absolutely wasn’t, and no, nobody would even realise they’d been there.

“What if someone spots us?” said Connor.

“I think I can explain that away without breaking a nail, Connor,” Claudia said. “And we don’t all have to go. I’ll go, and I’ll take Stephen, and - whoever you think is best at subtle breaking and entering, Ryan.”

Ryan nodded at Blade, whose head dipped in acknowledgement.

“Nick told me, before he died, that he thought he’d seen Helen once, here. At CMU.” Claudia put her hands in her pockets, and met everyone’s eyes, in turn. “And I think we know -” her eyes rested on Abby’s, and the other woman nodded imperceptibly - “that Nick would have wanted his tools, notes and so on, and that Helen would have found something to benefit from in those notes. If either of them came through this anomaly they may not be aware of the exact date, and they may have gone to Nick’s old office.”

“Nick’s dead,” Stephen said roughly.

“Frankly,” Claudia said, curling her hands into fists in her pockets, “I’m not going to be a hundred percent confident that he or Helen are dead until somebody shows me a body and a DNA test. And even then, if it’s Helen, I may insist on nailing the coffin shut myself.”

Stephen looked down at his feet.

“You don’t have to come,” she said.

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

Blade was usually even more impassive than Lorraine, and Claudia didn’t know him nearly as well, but even she could tell he wanted nothing to do with this.

It took them twenty minutes to walk across CMU’s campus to Earth Sciences. The place seemed perfectly deserted; it was no later than nine at night, but likely all the undergraduates had gone home, and few of the postgrads, postdocs or lecturers would still be on campus: lights burning in windows indicated that those that were still there were few, and closely engaged in work.

Blade kept eyeing up doors and windows for appropriate entrances. Stephen gave him a sideways look and reminded him that he still had several codes for the buildings, some of which might be live.

“Well, we can try that first,” Blade said, unruffled.

“Let’s,” Claudia said. “I still haven’t worked out how to explain you.”

One of Stephen’s working codes let them into the Earth Sciences building. Claudia walked a little ahead of him, Blade between the two of them and clearly bursting to tell her to get back behind him and Stephen to step it up, and the three of them moved quietly through darkened corridors lit only by the odd lamp from an office, or a few safety lights. No-one came out and challenged them; they didn’t even see anyone.

Claudia’s feet brought her to Nick’s office almost without her knowing. It had been locked by Dr Samantha Lockyear, who had adorned her door with a nameplate, a list of office hours, and a picture of her smiling face. Blade picked the lock without even asking, and the door swung open.

The office looked very different to before: much tidier, much emptier. If Claudia had to guess she would say that there were absolutely no fossils borrowed from the university labs and forgotten about hiding under a pile of procrastinated marking. It had been decorated for the holidays - there were holly, ivy and mistletoe transfers on the windows, and tinsel on the bookshelves - and it was totally devoid of anything that was Nick’s. There were no signs of any unauthorised entry except their own. Probably only Dr Lockyear would know if anything had been disturbed, but in any case, there would be no reason for Helen or even Nick to disturb anything. It was immediately apparent that this was no longer Nick’s office. If either of them had come here, they would probably have left as soon as they realised his room had been taken over.

Always supposing either of them had come here. Claudia was beginning to think she was overly affected by the creeping atmosphere and by the man she’d seen under that lamp-post - who was, after all, only any blond in London of an approximate height and build, having a smoke or taking a break or whatever. There were hundreds of them. Claudia used to see them everywhere she looked.

Blade ushered her and Stephen out of the office, and thoughtfully locked the door behind them. They made their way out by the fastest route - not one that Stephen had remembered the code for, but fortunately there was an exit button which didn't set off an alarm - and let themselves out by a rather shallow decorative water feature, one still lit and splashing merrily.

Claudia looked right and left, and then found herself frozen and blinking at something that was no longer there. Blade reacted alongside her, tensing visibly and drawing a knife, and Stephen squared up to whatever she had seen too - but Stephen, at the very least, was only responding to their reactions. Claudia could tell by the way he hissed “what?” It was not the same noise he made when he was incredulous.

Maybe they'd been working together too long. She blinked hard, and stared at the top stair and the road lit by orange lampposts beyond it.

“What did you see?" Blade said, quiet and level and too patient.

“I thought,” Claudia said, heart sinking at this fresh proof that only she had seen those strange figures, that all she had to rely on was the evidence of her disbelieving eyes. “I thought.”

She started towards the stairs, and Blade took one long step in front of her, not preventing her from moving, but preventing her from moving ahead of him. He swapped the knife for a gun, perhaps because he hadn't seen what she had and didn’t know how to adjust. “What did you think?”

Claudia didn't reply; she took a single faltering step forward, and then stopped.

“If you get spotted like that we’ll have the police called on us,” Stephen predicted, but he too closed up behind Claudia, so that they moved forward in a tight little knot. “Claudia, what did you see?”

“I thought - it must have been a trick of the light,” Claudia said, fumbling for words. “I thought I saw - Maybe I made it up.”

“You don't make shit up,” Blade said brusquely. Stephen made a noise of agreement. “And you don't see shit when it isn’t there. Who was it?”

Who, Claudia thought, not what. She supposed it made sense; she would have been much less shocked by a dinosaur, and both Blade and Stephen knew it. “I - Helen. And someone else. A man, I think, blond, maybe, I don’t - beyond the stairs.”

She pushed forward and climbed the stairs quickly, Blade at her shoulder and Stephen close behind. At the top there was nothing but a road lit for walkers, and dead leaves, and slush in the gutters, and when they were silent, there was no noise of anything but the wind.

“Maybe I imagined it,” Claudia said uncertainly, and then snorted quietly to herself. “Maybe it was a ghost.”

“Do you believe in ghosts?” Blade said. Somehow, it didn’t sound like a question.

“No,” Stephen said. “Look, if you really did see - them, then they’ll have to go back through the anomaly.”

“If they saw us,” Blade said grimly, “they won’t.”

“They must have seen us,” Claudia said. She rubbed her hands together uncomfortably. “Helen met my eyes. I think. Well, let’s go back, anyway.”

Stephen took them the quickest route back to the anomaly - it involved climbing two fences and threading through a shabby rock garden - and Blade set a much faster pace than before, almost pushing the two of them back to the safety of the rest of the team and a lot more men with guns. Helen was rarely obviously violent, but chaos and danger always followed in her wake, and nobody had heard much of her since Nick’s disappearance: they didn't know what she was like now.

Their return threw the anomaly team into confusion, and out of the almost festive mood they’d got themselves into watching the anomaly and eating cake. Claudia found she was almost as sorry to ruin the mood as she was to pick hesitantly through the flash of a sighting that might just have been her mind playing tricks on her. Whoever had been there, they had been there only for the blink of an eye; and strangely enough, while she was nearly sure that she had seen Helen or someone very much like her, it was much harder to identify the blond man who might have been Nick, standing some way behind her. But with no footprints, probably no CCTV footage, nothing to go on, it was impossible for Claudia to be really confident in her own mind that she really had seen either of them. Even with her colleagues' assurances that they trusted her impressions.

She’d have to bring this up with her extremely longsuffering therapist in the new year. She hoped they were paid very well.

Abby called in the sighting, and Captain Ryan made Claudia, Abby and Connor get into a vehicle and stay there, and Stephen decided they would all stay until the anomaly closed, just in case. Claudia couldn’t bring herself to disagree, even when it took until one in the morning: this was the best chance they’d had to catch Helen in months.

Abby fell asleep with her head in Connor’s lap. Claudia couldn’t sleep; she sat up watching the anomaly through the windscreen, and seeing very little. Eventually, as the anomaly flickered and closed and the team packed up to leave, Claudia tugged her new scarf from around her neck, folded it into a cushion, and made herself doze off for the long drive back to London.

“Hey, Claudia,” Julian said, opening the door to her a few days later in the middle of Kent. “I thought you weren’t sure you were going to make it.”

“I decided to make it,” Claudia said, smiling up at her brother - both older and taller than her, and obnoxiously used to taking advantage of both facts. He just grinned at her now, and swept her into a hug.

“Holiday jumper and everything!” he said when he released her, eyes suspiciously damp. “Let me get your bag.”

“You can help me park my bloody car first,” Claudia said, tugging self-consciously at her jumper (navy blue, sequinned silhouette of Crone in silver, sequinned silhouette of Maiden in gold, £15, Primark, and completely irresistible). “There’s no room!”

“Give me your keys, I’ll do it,” Julian said. “Mum and Dad will want to see you.”

“Don’t tell me they didn’t believe I’d show up either.” Claudia couldn't bring herself to feel hurt; she'd missed so many birthdays and dinners and get-togethers and christenings - and certainly every funeral, since too many of those came in her way as it was - that it was only natural they'd doubted. But after sitting through an exhaustive security debriefing, during which she had had to cop to both the sighting of the man under the lamppost and the fact that she had repeatedly mistaken strangers for Nick in the first flush of her grief, Claudia had found herself prepared to fight tooth and nail for the extended Yule at home that she had once been reluctant to commit to. There was nothing she wanted right more now than to sink into family board games and a saucepan's worth of spiced cider, to read books and watch the Doctor Who special with half an eye, to see the village bonfire go up in sparks and drive out to Tesco's with Julian for whatever Mum had forgotten, and -

Anyway, the local police were keeping an eye (for alleged reasons of national security), she had a panic button just in case, and her handbag contained some pepper spray and a small heavy bat Captain Ryan had spent an hour teaching her how to swing at people in order to break bones, and here she was. For Yule.

“Mum was sure,” Julian said, and grimaced and made a little see-sawing motion with one hand. “Dad…”

“Ouch,” Claudia said, and went into the house with her handbag. And pepper spray and bat and panic button.

Hero and Julius Brown had pulled out all the stops. Claudia had grown up in a family that celebrated Yule with enthusiasm, but here it seemed were all of her best childhood memories of Yule rolled into one; it made her worry that they had missed her more than she had realised, and had been more afraid about her. Here were all the favourite foods they’d shared, somewhat updated because Julius could now upend the brandy bottle into the pudding with a clear conscience, Claudia and Julian could help with the cooking, and the wassail wasn’t made with apple juice.

“And you're really staying for the whole holiday -“ Hero kept repeating, sounding faintly stunned.

“Yes, Mum,” Claudia laughed, catching her mother around the shoulders and kissing her cheek.

“Well you can't blame me for being surprised,” said Hero, and Claudia grimaced. She couldn’t. Julius stuffed a jug of wassail and a bowl of homemade hummus into her hands before she could get too guilty about it, and Claudia reminded herself not to wallow.

“Monopoly!” Julian said brightly, brandishing pita slices.

“But only if it doesn't cut across the Strictly Come Dancing special,” Julius stipulated, studding an enormous cut of pork shoulder with cloves and rubbing it with spices and sugar by way of a marinade that would hopefully melt into its flesh deliciously after overnight slow-cooking. He had gone to town with Delia's Yule, and while Claudia wasn't looking forward to the washing up, the roast duck already in the oven smelled so divine that she couldn’t bring herself to worry about it too much.

Monopoly was brutal (Hero won, by virtue of being the person everyone wanted least to upset) and ran on so long that the Strictly Come Dancing special had to be watched with trays of duck and honeyed carrots and peas on their laps, and Claudia found herself taking bets with Hero on how many of the dancers had had plastic surgery, principally to annoy her father. Julius held forth irritably about musicality and footwork for a few moments, and only succeeded in sending his children into hysterics. His wife kissed him lovingly, and asked how it would be if she got out the parkin she’d made for Claudia's visit and toasted him a slice (and then added that she'd always known about that one with the red hair, and that you had to respect gumption, which possibly slightly spoiled the effect).

After dinner they all slept for a few hours. Claudia woke to a strange sense of disconnection in time, half expecting the quiet knock on her door to be Abby or Ryan summoning her to an anomaly, almost shocked when she opened her eyes on her dim and dusky childhood bedroom and heard her mother say it was nearly dawn, and was she up yet? Outside Claudia could hear giggling and talking, and people making their way down the narrow streets towards the village green. She felt an almost child-like sense of excitement completely alien to the annoyance she usually felt when responding to an early-morning demand to get up and go, and only hissed and muttered to herself as she threw back the blankets and dressed in a hurry because it was cold. Julian was already downstairs making coffee in thermoses, and told Claudia that their father had already gone to hand out sparklers and prepare fireworks, and marshal the band out of their houses to make sure they were all present, awake, and sober - never a given with the brass section, apparently. Claudia thought of Finn and Kermit and the hipflask in the hospital.

“I forgot how much Dad loves Yule,” Claudia said nostalgically, burying her face in half a gallon of strong sugary tea. She had already surprised her brother once by refusing coffee, but it tasted too much like hours of fruitless watches over anomalies and hotel bedsides, and Claudia didn’t want to bring it here: if she was really going to cut down her caffeine consumption in the new year this seemed like a good place to start. In any case Claudia found Julian's coffee was no longer nearly strong enough to act on her. She'd have an espresso later to stave off a caffeine headache.

“You wouldn't have made nearly so much of an impression if you'd come home for Beltane,” Julian agreed, and Claudia winced and put down her tea to try to defend herself, only to be forestalled by a brotherly arm snaking round her shoulder and pulling her close. “Look, I know you had your reasons, it was obvious at Samhain you were pretty sad and tired.”

At Samhain Claudia had only managed two hours for a family lunch before rushing off to remonstrate with an apatosaur on a dual carriageway that hadn't been at all interested in what the anomaly team had to say. And there had been all the upheaval with moving house, and the whole business with Nick's will, as well, which in hindsight Claudia was willing to admit had caused a bit of a relapse. She had talked about that with her therapist too.

“Things have not been great,” she said. “With work and Nick and everything. And I think I've probably upset you and Mum and Dad very much, without meaning to, and I'm sorry about that. But Julian, I am getting better, I promise.”

“I know,” Julian said. She settled next to him, and they drank their coffee and tea in companionable silence for a few minutes. And then Julian knocked his head sideways against hers like they used to when they were kids, and she knocked back, and they grinned at each other, and things looked just a bit better than they had done before.

Julius Brown shot through the house muttering about sparklers, and Claudia sighed and went to help him while Julian made more tea and coffee.

“Mum! Where are the sparklers?”

“I refuse to be involved,” Hero shouted back from where she was looking out her earmuffs, it being too cold outside for a mere hat. So far as Claudia could tell, she'd found Claudia's old uni hoodie, Julian's ski thermals, an ancient picture hat last worn to a garden party that had ended in Hero giving evidence against the hostess in a theft case, four left gloves and a Red Army cap stolen by Julius under circumstances that remained unclear - but no earmuffs. “Nasty sparky things. I plead the Fifth Amendment!”

“Mum you're not even American,” Claudia shouted back, and found the sparklers on the hall table, where they had been prominently displayed to make them easy to find in the morning. And a pair of earmuffs, tucked into the pocket of Hero's good winter coat.

They piled out of the house and trooped out onto the village green in the charcoal half-darkness to join the murmuring mass of people there; slowly, but surely, the sky was beginning to grow paler. The children couldn't see it yet, tugging impatiently on hands and bouncing on their toes and asking impossible questions as Claudia and Julian distributed sparklers and their father hurried off to join the band, but it was there, and Claudia felt a sense of excitement so bright and new she was afraid to touch it.

The massive Yule log would be brought out tomorrow evening, of course, and there’d be music and dancing and a lot more food, not to mention part two of the Strictly Come Dancing special.(And Claudia and her mother winning or losing their bets.) But this was where it started: this, this single breathless moment, just before the dawn on the second-shortest day of the year, the end of the very longest night.

The sky lightened, to grey, to blue, and the sun peeked pale gold over the trees; someone gave a rather muffled shout, and the first of the fireworks exploded in a matching starburst of gold as the band broke into the first few wobbly bars of Glad Yule-tide and the people on the village green whooped and yelled. Claudia cheered with the rest of the crowd as she lit sparklers for the kids, no longer whinging and now wild with the festive season (and fireworks); Hero laughed, and Claudia clutched at her mother’s hand, and twirled the single sparkler she had kept back for her own personal use in the air, drawing bright curlicues in the air as the sun rose slowly over the earth. Hero smiled at her and grasped her hand tightly, and Claudia smiled back.

Claudia Brown, she wrote in the air before her sparkler fizzled out, and made a very quiet wish: not one about caffeine, or Nick, or anything else like that that (at the end of the day) didn't really matter. Something for herself.

And the year was born anew.


End file.
